Andrew Roberts
The Muslim Brotherhood should be banned and we must promote our history, traditions and values
‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”
In a society that has turned antiracism into almost a secular religion, those were brave words from David Cameron at the Munich Security Conference in February 2011, especially when he backed them up by refusing public money to any Muslim organisation that did not subscribe to the British values of universal human rights, equality before the law, democracy and integration rather than separation.
Monday night’s atrocity proves that there is no time to waste in intensifying every aspect of the Government’s “Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare” strategy. The “Pursue” aspect is working well – with dozens of plots uncovered before they can wreak the horrific massacre of the innocents that we saw in Manchester – but the “Prevent” side needs to be beefed up immediately, and the Cobra meetings this week are the best time to start. How can it be that on the budget for Prevent between the Treasury and the Home Office have been stalled until after the general election?
The security services – which were warned about the “Operation Trojan Horse” Islamisation of Birmingham’s state schools as early as 2011, but did nothing because it did directly not involve violence – must be ordered to combat all extremism, not merely the violent kind, for the obvious reason that one leads to the other. Society demands that if the alternative is having our children decapitated and maimed at pop concerts, we should be able to unleash the intelligence services to do their utmost within the law. Theresa May played an integral role in creating Cameron’s generally highly successful anti-terrorism agenda, but in the light of Manchester it’s clear that she needs to do more.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates need to be placed on the list of banned organisations as soon as possible. It is a disgrace that more sections of the excellent review of its activities by Sir John Jenkins and Charles Farr have still not been published by the Government, despite the executive summary having been in the public domain since December 2015. These distinguished men examined in detail the Brotherhood’s development and activities in the UK and concluded that “aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.” It discovered that although the military wing of Hamas was proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organisation in 2001, Hamas has been active here for over 10 years. Those MPS on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee who attacked the Jenkins Review should be ashamed of themselves, and the Muslim Brotherhood should be banned, just as Hamas and Hizbollah are.
Mr Cameron also pointed out how, even while we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, for years “we were tolerating extremists back at home who were poisoning the minds of young Muslims”. Today, a Muslim teacher in Manchester or Birmingham who finds pupils being radicalised by a colleague feels lonely and may be victimised if he speaks out. That culture needs to change, and the colleague must be disbarred from teaching. Without that, we are not going to alter the relentless sectarianism and grievance-mongering which characterises contemporary British Islamism.
Much of this derives from a belief in lunatic conspiracy theories that our education and culture do far too little to counter. The centre-right think tank Policy Exchange’s recent survey of over 3,000 British Muslims discovered that only 4 per cent can correctly identify who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, with many more believing “the Jews” or the American government perpetrated the attacks rather than al Qaeda. Similar conspiracy theories abound about the 7/7 attacks in London. Endless TV movies in which the villains are Western intelligence officers, and virtually never Islamist terrorists, leads to this paranoiac view that is so damaging to rational discourse. Broadcasters should be far more socially responsible about the message they pump out.
To listen to much of the narrative that infects our schools, universities and media, the West deserves everything it gets in the Bataclan in Paris and the Manchester Arena. The poisoning of the minds of young Muslims is relentless, and the voices of reason few. Instead, British culture and especially history should be promoted as something of which British Muslims should be proud. As Mr Cameron said: “Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. These are what define us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things.”
We must say to the extremists, unequivocally and objectively, that we are better than them, and teaching people the positive aspects of our history is an invaluable part of that. The pre-emptive cringe over issues such as colonialism and imperialism has led to unnecessary self-hatred and guilt, largely because of the lack of historical context they are taught in, and an almost obsessive concentration on issues such as slavery, when it was the Navy that ended the slave trade. The greatest Muslim armies in history were the two that volunteered to fight for George V and George VI against totalitarianism in the two world wars, a fact of which modern British Muslims should be proud.
In the face of monstrous crimes like the Manchester atrocity we tend to tell ourselves that there’s little or nothing we can do to protect our way of life, besides staying vigilant. It’s not true; there is plenty that can be done if we insist our politicians do it, and the ideal time to tell them is when they’re asking for our votes. Manchester and Britain deserve nothing less.